Baby Kaitlyn is here!

Kaitlyn Ellen Phillips was born on January 18th 2009 at 11:30 AM. She weighed 6 pounds 5 ounces and is 19 and one quarter inches long. It was a rough ride but she's finally here!

It all started on Friday the 16th of January at about 11:00 AM when I received a phone call from Jennifer telling me that while at her NST the doctor told her that her blood pressure was through the roof and that there was a good possibility that they were going to have to induce her today! Kaitlyn wasn't supposed to come until the 15th of February!

So after trying to calm Jennifer down, while trying to keep calm myself, and a quick call to work I was on my way to the hospital. When I got there the doctors still weren't sure if they were going to induce Jen and they were constantly testing Jen's blood pressure and monitoring the baby's heart. After awhile and a lot of explaining by the nurses that it wasn't necessarily a bad thing to have to induce labor at 35 and a half weeks, the doctor said it was time for Kaitlyn to come out and play.

So off we went to the delivery room and the “fun” began. At first it wasn't too bad, they hooked up the baby heart rate monitor, contraction monitor and then let us be for awhile. Later the nurse came in and told us they were going to give Jen an I.V. of a drug called Pitocin to make her contractions stronger and monitor the baby's heart to make sure that Kaitlyn could handle the stresses of child birth. After awhile Jen's contractions got stronger and she was starting to get a little uncomfortable. About 2 hours later the doctor looked over the data the monitors had collected and said that Kaitlyn's heart looked great and that she appeared to be handling the contractions fine. We both breathed a sigh of relief and got ready for the next step.

The nurses stopped the I.V. of Pitocin and started Jen on Misoprostil which was to soften her cervix to help Jen to start dilating. In the mean time it was a perfect time to eat because you can't eat anything when you're on an I.V. of Pitocin and Jen was STARVING! So after we ate and hours of cervical exams to see the progress of softening plus more doses of Misoprostil which were very uncomfortable for Jen because it's a vaginal suppository that has to be pushed all the way up to the cervix, it quickly became Saturday afternoon. Did I mention it was almost impossible to get any sleep because of the constant in and out of doctors, visitors, vital signs being taken and even more exams? We were starting to wonder if poor Jen was going to have any energy for actual labor when it came!

Now it's Saturday evening and the doctors decide that the Misoprostil has done all it's going to do so it was time to start up the Pitocin again to see if that will help Jen's cervix to dilate and get the show on the road. After a few hours, a few times upping the dose of Pitocin, and a few changes in the way Jen was laying in bed because the baby was having “Variables” which were scary in themselves, they realized Jen's cervix was just not cooperating. Her cervix had barely dilated at all and Jen was starting to get exhausted from lack of sleep and food plus the contractions. So the doctors decide the best plan of attack now is to insert a Foley Bulb into Jen's cervix. For anyone who doesn't know what a Foley Bulb is (I sure didn't before this), it's a rubber tube that has an inflatable ball at the end of it. It gets inserted into the cervix and then inflated to manually dilate the cervix kind of like a car jack. After the discomfort of having a mini beach ball inflated in Jen's cervix the only thing left to do was wait until the Foley Bulb fell out indicating that Jen's cervix had dilated to 4cm.

Early Sunday morning following multiple exams, many position changes due to baby “Variables” which is a doctors term for something is wrong with the baby but we don't want to alarm the parents so we'll call it Variables, the Foley Bulb fell out. So now we had to wait until Jen's cervix dilated a little more and active labor started. A few hours later Sunday morning Jen was going to the bathroom and I guess Kaitlyn was tired of living in a waterbed because Kaitlyn kicked her amniotic sac so hard it burst! Jennifer's water had finally broken! Now Jen's contractions were VERY uncomfortable. The doctor decided that now was a good time to insert a fetal heart monitoring electrode into Jen's cervix and attach it to Kaitlyn's head to give a much better indication of how well Kaitlyn was handling everything. After another few painful hours for Jen and fussing around with the external contraction monitor which hardly worked at all, the doctor decided that it would be a good idea to insert a contraction monitoring tube into Jen's cervix for better monitoring and a little more safety for Kaitlyn. With the mention of safety for Kaitlyn we of course were fully onboard with this plan. Unfortunately this is where everything took a turn for the worse.

Not less than a minute after the doctor got the contraction monitoring tube inserted Jennifer starting having sharp chest pains and trouble breathing, her mouth went numb and she started having shooting pains in her left arm. Then Kaitlyn's heart rate plummeted. In about 40 seconds the room which had a doctor, a nurse, and me and Jen now had about 5 more doctors and nurses all running around speaking weird doctor gibberish while quickly unhooking Jen and her bed from everything that tethered them to the room. About the only thing that I could decipher from all the doctors gibberish, because they said not a word to me, was that they were taking Jen to the operating room for an emergency C-section. I was panicked and had no idea what to do and they were rushing Jen out the door and down the hall, still not a word had been spoken to me, and I shouted “Am I allowed to come?”, of course there was no response so I shouted it again and then finally a nurse said something to me which was “I don't know”. Now at this point I was a little bit furious. I had been in the military for 6 years and had waited to have a child because I wanted to know that I would be there for my child's birth and everything else in my child's life. That was definitely not a possibility in the Navy. About a month before my separation day in the military when it was still up in the air whether or not I was going to reenlist we found out that Kaitlyn was coming. This of course complicated a lot of things. Thanks to my wonderful parents and my Uncle David who gave me a helping hand I was able to leave the military and make sure we were going to be able to live and that I would be able to be there for our child. Now these people were telling me “I don't know if you can see your child being born”. Thank goodness about 20 seconds after they had Jen out the door and everybody was gone from the room except for me a nurse came in with some scrubs and told me to put them on and come with her. I thought I was going to see Jen but instead I was led to a chair and told to sit tight and somebody would inform me when and if I could see her later. After about 5 very nervous minutes a nurse came to me and told me I could see Jen, so I followed her in to the room and saw Jen lying on the operating table. Jennifer told me that the baby's heart rate had normalized and that they were going to keep her there to monitor everything for about an hour just to be sure. I talked with Jen for a few minutes and then we decided it would be a good idea to give Sheila (Jen's mom) a call to make sure she new what was going on since I started to call her once Jen was whisked from the room and before she picked up I had to go because the nurse had came back with scrubs for me and told me to hurry. After awhile the doctors decided everything was okay and we all went back to the labor and delivery room. Shortly after we got back to our old room there was a shift change and a new doctor came in to introduce himself. He told us he was a much more conservative doctor and that knowing what had just happened that at the slightest sign of anything being wrong he was going to recommend a C-section. Me and Jen weren't sure what to think at the time. While being happy that the doctor was playing it safe we still really wanted a traditional child birth and all the good things that come from one. The mother heals faster, it's better physically for the baby and a better bonding experience for everyone. We were worried that if Kaitlyn so much as sneezed he was going to call for a C-section. He told us that he was going to monitor Kaitlyn's vitals again for about an hour and then decide to proceed with either a C-section or begin the I.V. of Pitocin again and start the process of a “natural” child birth.

The first sign we got that this doctor was a complete jerk was when he checked Kaitlyn's heart monitor wiring that went into Jen's cervix and said &ldquoWell, I guess you really are a natural red head&rdquo. What kind of doctor makes a comment like that about a patients pubic hair!? After that he left for an hour and came back and reviewed Kaitlyn's logs and told us that her heart rate was dropping about 50 percent of the time when Jen had contractions without even having an I.V. of Pitocin which is a bad thing and recommended getting a C-section. This upset me and Jen a lot, one that there was something wrong with our baby and two that we wouldn't have a natural child birth. He told us that it was up to us and that if we chose not to have a C-section, based on what he saw by reading Kaitlyn's vitals log, that there was a possibility to have emergency C-section which I may or may not be allowed to be there for. He knew that I really wanted to see Kaitlyn's birth and I had a slight feeling he was playing on that by the things he was telling us. We just got the feeling like he was trying to rush us into the decision and trying to basically rush us through our whole labor and delivery process. It was like we were taking up too much of their time. The doctor then told us he would give us ten minutes to talk it over alone and then he would come back and see what our decision was. He left but the nurse stayed behind and kept telling us why a C-section was SOOO great and really our best option. I was starting to feel like we were on a used car lot with a pushy salesman trying to get us to buy something we never wanted in the first place. The nurse left in about 2 minutes and me and Jen started to talk it over. About 2 minutes later the doctor came back and was demanding our decision. That was a quick 10 minutes I thought. Me and Jen had already come to our decision though so it wasn't a big deal, just another feeling of being rushed. We had decided that we really didn't want to take the risk of anything happening to Kaitlyn even if the doctor might be over cautious it wasn't worth the risk. We had decided to take the doctors advice. After a minute I headed out to make phone calls and update everyone on what was happening and then headed back up to the room.

Now we go to the actual C-section. I get my scrubs back on and sit in the same chair I was in only a few hours ago and wait for someone to tell me I can come in. My heart is racing knowing that in only a few minutes I'm going to be a dad! In a short while a nurse came out and said I could come in. She asked if I had my camera and I told her yes. They informed me that they would let me know when I could take a picture and not to just start snapping shots. Not that I would do that anyways. I walked into the operating room and saw Jen sprawled out on the operation table and was led to a chair by her head. Me and Jen's view of everything was blocked by a big blue medical tarp coming up from her chest. The doctors had a little pre-surgery pow-wow and everything began. It was a little disconcerting how you could see Jen's body being pushed and tugged on by the way her head and chest were jerking about. There was weird slurping and sucking sounds that accompanied the jerks while Jen being all drugged up just kept saying “Whoa, that feels weird” with her eyes all glazed over. Even more infuriating than how rough they were being was the fact that the surgeons were all laughing and joking and talking about sports or what they did last weekend. It was like they were working at Burger King just slapping together a double Whopper with cheese. I was getting very upset and poor Jen was nauseous and vomiting. After a few minutes of that the doctor asked if I would like to look over the tarp and see Kaitlyn being born. I immediately said yes and stood up to watch. Seconds later they pulled Kaitlyn from the incision. I couldn't believe my eyes, our daughter was finally here. Later in reflection it hit me then how weird it was. It was indescribable. Some people believe in love at first sight but I didn't at the time. I went from never seeing this baby before in my life to loving it with all of my heart plus some in the matter of 2 seconds. I can't think of any other time in life this phenomenon exists or how it's possible but it happened. It truly was love at first sight. She was crying and the doctors were cleaning everything and then handed her off to the nurses to be further cleaned. I began telling Jen about how beautiful she was and how she had a lot of hair. Jen just smiled and said “You're a daddy now!”. She was so drugged up she couldn't even really enjoy her child's birth the way she should be able to. She was out of it. It was like we were taking a walk on the beach and nothing even mattered or was important. This of course further angered me, not at Jen but at the whole situation. In a couple of minutes the nurses that had Kaitlyn asked me if I would like to cut the umbilical cord which is a funny thing. I didn't even realize it until writing this now that they had already cut the umbilical cord, all I was doing was trimming it. I guess I wasn't really all there myself while totally sober. After I trimmed the umbilical cord the nurse swaddled Kaitlyn up and let me hold her and show her to Jen. After about a minute they told me it was time for Kaitlyn to go to the Infant Care nursery and that I could come if I wanted. I asked Jen if she needed me to stay with her or to just go with Kaitlyn and she said she was fine. I went with Kaitlyn to the baby nursery and watched as they examined her to make sure everything was fine. They checked her blood sugar and gave her vaccines. Her blood sugar was low but they said that was common in babies born at 36 weeks. Then a doctor came in to run some other tests on her, he just pulled on her arms and legs and listened to her breathing and heart. After watching that, one of the nurses change Kaitlyn's diaper and taking some video of our new baby a nurse came in and told me that I could visit Jen in the mother recovery room.

-TO BE CONTINUED-